Antisocial personality disorder (APD or ASPD) is a psychiatric diagnosis that interprets antisocial and impulsive behaviours as symptoms of a personality disorder. Psychiatry defines only pathological antisocial behavior; it does not address potential benefits of positive antisocial behavior or define the meaning of 'social' in contrast to 'antisocial'.

Professional psychiatry generally compares APD to sociopathy and psychopathic disorders (not to be confused with psychosis). Approximately 3% of men and 1% of women are thought to have some form of antisocial personality disorder according to DSM-IV.

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A common misconception is that many of the individuals diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder can be found in prisons. It should be noted that criminal activity does not automatically warrant a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder, nor does a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder imply that a person is a criminal. It is hypothesized that many high achievers exhibit antisocial personality disorder characteristics. This, however, brings much criticism upon the diagnostic criteria specified for those exhibiting antisocial personality disorder and the PCL-R. Both of these tests depend upon the person in question being a criminal or having participated in criminal activities.

Research has shown that individuals with antisocial personality disorder are indifferent to the possibility of physical pain or many punishments, and show no indications that they experience fear when so threatened; this may explain their apparent disregard for the consequences of their actions, and their lack of empathy to the suffering of others.

Central to understanding individuals diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder is that they do not appear to experience true human emotions, or at least, they do not appear to experience a full range of human emotions. This can explain the lack of empathy for the suffering of others, since they cannot experience emotion associated with either empathy or suffering. Risk-seeking behavior and substance abuse may be attempts to escape feeling empty or emotionally void. The rage exhibited by psychopaths and the anxiety associated with certain types of antisocial personality disorder may represent the limit of emotion experienced, or there may be physiological responses without analogy to emotion experienced by others.

One approach to explaining antisocial personality disorder behaviors is put forth by sociobiology, a science that attempts to understand and explain a wide variety of human behavior based on evolutionary biology. One route to doing so is by exploring evolutionarily stable strategies; that is, strategies that being successful will tend to be passed on to the next generation, thus becoming more common in the gene pool. For example, in one well-known 1995 paper by Linda Mealey, chronic antisocial/criminal behavior is explained as a combination of two such strategies.

Antisocial personality disorder and the closely related construct of psychopathy can be assessed and diagnosed through clinical interview, self-rating personality surveys, and ratings from coworkers and family. For diagnosing psychopathy in forensic male populations, the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) is considered definitive.

The DSM-IV confound: some argue that an important distinction has been lost by including both sociopathy and psychopathy together under APD. As Hare et al write in their abstract, "The Axis II Work Group of the Task Force on DSM-IV has expressed concern that antisocial personality disorder (APD) criteria are too long and cumbersome and that they focus on antisocial behaviors rather than personality traits central to traditional conceptions", concluding, "... conceptual and empirical arguments exist for evaluating alternative approaches to the assessment of psychopathy ... our hope is that the information presented here will stimulate further research on the comparative validity of diagnostic criteria for psychopathy; although too late to influence DSM-IV." [1]

Antisocial Personality Disorder is negatively correlated with all DSM-IV Axis I disorders except substance-abuse disorders. Antisocial Personality Disorder is most strongly correlated with Psychopathy as measured on the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R).

Obviously, not all children who exhibit these signs grow up develop anti-social personality disorder, but these signs are found in significantly higher proportions than in the general population.

A child who shows signs of anti-social personality disorder will be diagnosed as having either conduct disorder or oppositional defiant disorder. Not all of these children will grow up to develop anti-social personality disorder.